Moto G4 Play review: Fits the budget phone tag but has a tough fight ahead of it

Moto G4 Play is like a smaller, less-powerful version of the Moto G4 and there is also a family resemblance with many other Motorola phonesHitesh Raj Bhagat | ET Bureau | October 27, 2016, 09:29 IST

Many people have a simple requirement from a smartphone: it should be affordable and work well for all basic smartphone tasks.

They don't need to capture or store thousands of photos and 4K videos, they don't want to play very heavy games and they don't need cutting-edge specs and performance they will never use.

This is where a bulk of phone purchases are and the G4 Play fits the bill. It's like a smaller, less-powerful version of the Moto G4 and there is also a family resemblance with many other Motorola phones. Even though Motorola is now a Lenovo company, phones with these two brand names can be told apart.

The G4 Play has a simple, attractive and no-nonsense design. All the basics are there: good grip, rounded corners, removable back cover and battery, 3.5mm port, microUSB, dual cameras, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS et al. Motorola's philosophy of using a bloatware-free, pure version of Android has many fans and it helps keep their phones (even basic phones like this one) feel responsive.

Battery life is one of the key points here and the G4 Play doesn't disappoint: it easily does a day and a half (two full days with light use) and if you run a video on loop, you'll get over 12 hours. This is largely due to the efficient internals and software that puts everything to sleep when it senses that the phone is not being used.

Performance is good for basic use but don't expect it to sail through very heavy games or apps -you'll see frame drops and slowdowns in this case. We found no issues with call quality and signal strength though the loudspeaker is quite weak for both music and calls.

The cameras are the surprise element and hit above this price range in terms of quality, colours and sharpness. The camera app starts up fast and includes basic settings for you to tweak. Best results were outdoors though -the photos got pre dictably worse as the light dimmed. The front camera also captures bright selfies.

A couple of only areas where you'll feel that corners have been cut are the all-plastic build and the display. By no means is it a 'bad' display but it doesn't have very good viewing angles or brightness.

The 720p resolution is more than enough for this screen size. Overall, this is a good price for a Moto but competitors like Xiaomi have raised the bar high with phones like the Redmi 3S Prime. It's also priced at Rs 8,999 but it includes a fingerprint scanner, double the RAM storage (3GB/32GB), a more premium full metal unibody design, more powerful processor and a massive 4,100mAh battery. The G4 Play has a tough fight ahead of it.